Muppet Show (and movies) -- Search and Destroy

Destroy - Muppet Treasure Island really wasnt very good, because Treasure Island isn't.

Destroy: The last one...what was it? Muppets in Space? The one where Gonzo finds out he is an alien. All the Muppet charm was lost in that one.

Search: Beeker, The Swedish Chef Destroy: Sam the Eagle

Yeah, that band was so cool... Dr. Teeth, Janice, Zoot, ANIMAL (Woman! Woman! Womannnnn!) did I miss anyone?

Can't forget to mention those lesser knowns like Camilla the chicken and those sarcasta-rats. Loved the giant monster muppets too...

Destroy: Muppet Babies. Especially the female Scooter.

Destroy - The whole of that last series, especially the new characters, and the lack of Scooter and Rolf.

Even if I absolutely hated the movie -- which I don't -- the commentary track would make it worthwhile. Also, while it doesn't hold up to the Jim Henson ones, it also leaves out the one thing which always bugged me in those: the Kermit/Piggy love plot.

Destroy: That buggery little kid. Boil him in oil!

Sadly I would say destroy (not totally): anything made after Henson died.
He was one of the great geniuses of the 20th century.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1575208429

Make me a copy if you get it. ;-)

Search above all: that incredible opening song/scene.

It contains the best version of For What it's Worth done by anyone and the versions of Time in a Bottle and New York State of Mind are utterly superb.

(xpost!)

Search: Tales from Muppetland. I probably watched The Frog Prince and Hey, Cinderella! about 100 times growing up. Both were pretty great; I do not think they have been released on DVD yet, which is a shame.

Also, Muppets Take Manhattan rules.

nice review Marcello. great record.

is known to me

oh go on then.

Destroy: Whoever at Disney decided to give the Swedish Chef human hands in the last one.

The Swedish Chef has always had human hands!

Yeah, I was going to say.

Is that really true?

*Does quick YouTube search*

Yes you are quite right, it just looks much creepier in HD.

What in the goddamn world

https://gizmodo.com/its-a-very-merry-muppet-christmas-tv-movie-kermit-2002-1849829198

I highly recommend you watch the movie and see what Kermit discovers. (If one were to look online for it, and one found such a video of it, one might consider beginning at 1:02:14.) In case you can’t legally purchase it, let me tell you a few of the things that have happened in a Kermit-less world:

* Fozzie is a pickpocket
* Miss Piggy pretends to be a Jamaican fortune teller on a 1-900 pay phone line
* Rizzo the Rat is forced to torment contestants on Fear Factor and then be eaten alive
* The Muppet Theater has become a sleazy nightclub holding raves where Dr. Honeydew lets people in, Scooter dances in a cage, and Beaker is a terrifyingly buff bouncer
* Doc Hopper’s Frog Legs fast food franchise goes national, since Kermit wasn’t there to stop it in the first Muppets film

Should you wish to explore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm_WSZcdv6A

And if you're wondering who that is in the still there: “Matthew Lillard as Luc Fromage, a foppish French choreographer”

It's very bad and forgettable for most of its runtime but cage dancer Scooter is perma-scorched onto the back of my eyes.

A Muppet show special tonight on ABC and streaming on disney+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSLE5Psfs6U

it is once again time to meet the muppets

had a good time with this

It's weird that it's (partially) a tribute to a show that's a tribute to vaudeville - but yeah it was a lot of fun.

It the only other surviving example of "we'll have a guest on, if they're a singer they'll sing a few songs, they'll definitely be in a few sketches" ... SNL? Which would help with spotting that Carpenter was perfect for this.

thought this was fantastic! - only bum note was Kermit’s voice but u cant have everything

Loved this - light and breezy, didnt go for the ponderous "legacy" angle and just picked up where the original run left off - btw is this the first "muppet show" since then or have there been other one-offs through the years?

I assumed this was the premiere of an entire season, now I find out that's it? why would you do that?

xp they had two seasons of Muppets Tonight in the 90s where the premise was that they were doing a variety/talk show to mixed results. The Muppets was in 2015 but they tried doing this framing mockumentary-style thing like it was The Office and was not great. and Muppets Now, which was just sketches with another framing device of Scooter putting together clips or something

I think it's nice that someone was finally able to make the point that they should just make The Muppet Show without having to pitch some spin on it. Just do the show. People like it. Disney now has the original show's episodes streaming, so I'd expect a boost in people watching those now, and maybe we get more episodes?

There's also a 3D animated Muppet Babies, and something called The Muppets Mayhem: "Junior A&R executive Nora must deal with the madness caused by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, who come face-to-face with the modern musical business as they try to record their first-ever album, which will go platinum."

Bret McKenzie did some very good work on the 2011 movie and he's from New Zealand. I had not realized the extent to which Muppets resonated internationally.

thought this was fantastic! - only bum note was Kermit’s voice but u cant have everything

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, February 6, 2026 9:51 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

they had Kermit as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel recently and I couldn't help but notice it didn't really sound like him at all

yeah its an approximation more than anything. you really notice it the most in the singing duet w Sabrina, Kermit’s voice is autotuned like crazy & it sounded very off

When did they add humans to the Muppet Show audience?

The autotune on Kermit was so distracting and unnecessary. Who needs Kermit to sing in perfect pitch, its Kermit the Frog ffs?

xp on this show

things i did not like

- the brightly-lit humans in the audience
- the whizzy camera movements on transitions
- the canned laughter. nothing wrong with canned laughter per se but it felt off. tinny, weird
- the hyper-saturation of colour
- gonzo's recurring bit was just not funny
- throughline of miss piggy's number getting cut simply dropped

THAT SAID they fucking nailed it. the essential tone of the muppet show was there. putting on a show, backstage shenanigans, kermit getting humiliated, miss piggy being imperious. they really did it. pepe showing up backstage in a black turtleneck and gold chain - i was DYING

my 14-year-old was AGHAST that i wanted to watch this but i just bulldozed him into it and 5 minutes into it he was laughing along

Enjoyed this but the jokes could've been sharper. My memory of the original show is that everything devolves into total chaos, and this felt a bit cool and collected to me, except for the great Beaker/Maya Rudolph bit.

In summary, yes do more but funnier and more CHAOS

well you do have cloned beaker eyeballs falling on everyone’s heads and into a saxophone, you have the chickens’ feathers being blown off by a fan operated by a maniacal stagehand.. But I do think you’re onto something texturally.. Modern TV making is a very controlled process

Yes, I wanted to see more chaos during that chicken hurricane scene -- clouds of feathers, muppets blowing across screen at high speeds, etc.

So do we think this is a test run to gauge interest in a full reboot? I hope so! They certainly alluded to this in the show.

going to leave my account logged in and streaming classic Muppet Show 24/7 to pump up those numbers

That would be - dare I say it - Muppetational.

"So do we think this is a test run to gauge interest in a full reboot? I hope so! They certainly alluded to this in the show."

There's something slightly bitter-sweet about the Muppets. On the one hand some of the attempts to reboot them have almost-but-not succeeded without taking properly, e.g the movie from a few years ago was popular but the series was killed off by the sequel, which flopped. But on the other hand the characters are too memorable to truly die, so the franchise is in a perpetual semi-alive, semi-dead state. They exist in our hearts and minds.

It's like Mickey Mouse. I was puzzled by Mickey Mouse as a kid because he was iconic, widely-known, but he wasn't in any actual media. There were no Mickey Mouse films, no Mickey Mouse franchise, no transforming Mickey Mouse toys. Donald Duck is far more active. Even Goofy has a higher workload than Mickey, the slacker. Probably the most recent famous thing Mickey was in was Fantasia, and that came out eighty years ago. And yet he lives on.

the premature death of Jim Henson was the official end of my childhood— one spent watching Sesame Street and the Muppet Show right at the important single digit ages

the series was killed off by the sequel, which flopped

I was reading (in Wikipedia) last week about this, which is insane: Muppets Most Wanted is ten times better than the first one, but it got a lot of "Well, the original spark isn't there" reviews. There's parts of the previous movie where you have to care about the Jason Segel / Amy Adams romance - any caring about humans that you do in Most Wanted is entirely on your own time. And The Muppets' main new muppet is a) somehow not the felt homunculus of Segel's character that the poster demands and b) the world's first 100% boring muppet.

The Muppets was lovely and the dynamic between Segel and his muppet brother was really sweet. It was a great way to bring them back. I didn't get round to the sequel for a while. Ricky Gervais's meanness and shitty acting put me off. TBF, he plays a shitty character, but the other human guests wipe the floor with them, not least Ray Liotta, who is clearly having a ball. Most Wanted is a lot of fun, and the best bits are properly daft and chaotic, but it feels more like a bunch of sketches than a well-plotted story with heart. I actually like the mockumentary series they did, not least cos it had a lot of Pepe, and the Electric Mayhem spin off was good fun, if inessential.

I loved Most Wanted - maybe my favorite muppet movie actually. Evil Kermit/Konstantin was genius

I was the biggest fan of “the muppets.”— I need to rewatch before getting more into it but I just loved it and was surprised to learn recently that I was generally bad and hated

Well, I was surprised to hear that it wasn't, so there!

Wow that’s a typo for the ol journal

(i totally missed the typo!)

"I just loved it and was surprised to learn recently that I was generally bad and hated"

I was surprised as well. Earlier in the year I spent a couple of weeks in Seoul, and on the train from the airport to the city centre one of the screens was playing a propaganda film. It was about some islands that had been annexed by Japan. I didn't get the whole meaning on account of the language barrier, but the screen kept flashing up the message HISTORY KNOWS THE TRUTH and RON ZERTNERT KNOWS THE TRUTH and 160,000 DEAD and RON ZERTNERT with stock footage of Japanese soldiers and things exploding.

I remember trying to strike up a conversation with my landlady. "What do you think of Ron Zertnert from Ilxor", I asked her, at which point she slapped me in the face and told me that the entire nation of Korea would not rest until that man was brought before the international criminal court. She then proceeded to make a slashing motion across her throat. She did this four times.

You know Europa, the moon of Jupiter? NASA recently discovered a plaque embedded in the ice. ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, it says, in English, EXCEPT FOR RON ZERTNERT BECAUSE HE IS BAD.

Ron Zertnert is the reason why no-one on Ilxor is legally allowed to visit Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. Many years ago I said "good morning" to one of my work colleagues. He laughed at me and told me that it was four minutes past midday, and that it wasn't morning any more, and that I was stupid. His name? Ron Zertnert.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExN3RhNDBrd3ZvZm45YTNnenJiNWtid2t0eDF3NWt3Z3JnNmJrb2UyYyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/8mJT8sQxpaQdKubpOi/giphy.gif

watching the new one's intro I realize that one of the things that has sort of always been in subconscious my entire life pushing me to make particular choices artistically and otherwise has been the visual of all the muppets under arches that get smaller as they stack up towards the ceiling of the theater

i had a realisation too - that watching the Muppet Show at such a young age seeded the idea of "putting on a show" and "being backstage" as fun, chaotic things that some grownups seemed to get to do and i wanted to be part of that world somehow

I've been thinking about that, partly due to the podcast Sentimental Garbage speaking about musical theater as a metaphor or a utopian analogy.

The interlocking parts of show business, the way people have tp work together to do a collaborative, creative production; if somebody doesn't do their part - build the set, light the lights, etc. - the whole thing can be derailed. So people (and puppets) roll up their sleeves because the show must go on.

When I was younger I was susceptible to probably glib thought - that things would be better if we just put on a show together. There are costumes in the attic and my daddy's got a barn. Not sure I would say that now.